Books on Benjamin Geer

Mona Ja‘bub, Leading Society Towards Change

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

[English version of the text published in Spanish.¹]

Mona Salem Said Ja‘bub, قيادة المجتمع نحو التغيير: التجربة التربوية لثورة ظفار (1969-1992) [Leading Society towards Change: The Educational Experience of the Dhofar Revolution (1969-1992)], Beirut: مركز دراسات الوحدة العربية [Centre for Arab Unity Studies], first edition 2010, second edition 2023, 368 pages.

This first book by Omani historian Mona Ja‘bub has earned praise in the Arab world for its approach to the social and cultural history of the Dhofar revolution in Oman. Published by a prestigious Arab publishing house specialised in social science, the book was initially withdrawn by the Omani authorities from the Muscat International Book Fair in 2012, but it returned the next day, a sign of the relaxation of censorship. The book focuses on gender issues and on the circulation of ideas. Through an analysis of historical events little known outside the Arab world, it makes an original contribution to the study of the global reception of Maoism and Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s.

From 1968 to 1975, a Marxist-Leninist revolution took place in the province of Dhofar in the Sultanate of Oman, against the Sultan Said and his successor Qaboos, who were dependent on the British Empire. At that time, Dhofar had a subsistence economy, and its population lived in extreme poverty. On the coast there was fishing, on the plains there was some agriculture, mainly cultivation of incense trees, and in the highlands cattle were raised. Even after oil exports began in 1967, the state collected taxes without providing any services to the population. Modern medicine was unknown, the only school was reserved for the Sultan’s court, and most of the inhabitants of Dhofar, and nearly all the women, were illiterate. In the Dhofari tribal system, land belonged to the tribes, not to individuals; some tribes enjoyed more prestige than others and had the privilege of bearing arms. At the bottom of the social hierarchy were people that the tribes and the Sultan had enslaved.

An armed Dhofari rebellion inspired by Arab nationalism, launched in 1965 by Dhofaris living in Kuwait and supported by the Nasser regime in Egypt, was discredited by the defeat of Egypt and its allies in the June 1967 war with Israel. Several months later, a group of Dhofari militants travelled to China to be trained as revolutionaries. They returned home convinced by Maoism, on a ship loaded with weapons and food. All this enabled Dhofari communists to take control of what came to be called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arab Gulf. (Since it changed its name several times, I will simply call it the Popular Front.) This turn to the left was strengthened by the unfailing support that the Dhofari revolution received from South Yemen, Oman’s neighbour, which in 1970 became the only communist country in the Arab world.

However, the application of Marxist theory to the local context was controversial. When the Popular Front commissioned a Bahraini Marxist to write a report on the class structure in Dhofar, the report concluded that there were no social classes in Dhofar, only tribes. The Popular Front’s leaders refused to accept this conclusion, and the report was not published. They acknowledged that there was no proletariat or bourgeoisie in Dhofar, but claimed that the tribes were in fact classes.

The Popular Front banned slavery in the liberated areas. It abolished tribal ownership of land, and all land became public property. Under the impetus of feminist activists within its ranks, it made women’s liberation one of the pillars of its doctrine. Women therefore took up arms in the revolutionary army, women’s literacy was made a priority, and polygamy was abolished.

But the militants believed that the social transformation they aspired to required not only decrees imposed by force, but also an education system capable of instilling in its pupils values and behaviours that went against tradition. Other researchers have examined the political aspects of the Dhofari revolution, but the originality of Mona Ja‘bub’s book lies in its focus on the educational activities of the Popular Front, particularly the primary school and the secondary school that it established in Yemen, near the Omani border. Ja‘bub interviewed many former activists and former pupils of these schools, and this enables her to paint an intimate portrait of an attempt to adapt Marxist theory to a context that was very different from the industrial economy that Marx had in mind.

The idea that Dhofaris belonged to the Arab nation was a fundamental part of the Popular Front’s ideology. Standard Arabic, which they saw as the national language of the Arabs, was therefore a central aspect of the culture that the revolutionary teachers sought to transmit to their pupils. In the Arab world, many different Arabic dialects, some of which are mutually unintelligible, are used in everyday life, while Standard Arabic, which few people can speak, is used mainly in writing and in formal discourse. However, the pupils spoke a Shehri, a distant cousin of Arabic, and apparently did not understand Standard Arabic or any Arabic dialect. At first, the teachers dealt with this situation by requiring the pupils to speak only in Standard Arabic (which would have been seen as strange in all other Arab countries) and by forbidding them to speak in Shehri, even outside the classroom; offenders were punished. If the pupils needed a word that they did not know in Arabic, they could only use gestures to express their meaning. The teachers told the pupils that this was part of their duty to their Arab homeland. Ja‘bub shows that the pupils not only obeyed these rules out of fear, but also truly internalised them. A former pupil recalls that one day, while talking to the cook at the school canteen, she inadvertently used a Shehri word, and immediately felt ashamed. She reported herself to the school administration, and only felt better after having apologised in front of all the other pupils. Later, a new head teacher repealed the ban on Shehri, and implemented a policy of promoting Dhofari culture.

The schools of the Popular Front were sorely lacking in resources during their early years. At first, there were no buildings, only tents. With no textbooks available, pupils copied their lessons by hand. For four years, the only book available in sufficient quantities for teaching reading and writing in Arabic was a translation of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, of which China supplied many copies with each delivery of weapons. It was also the Front’s most important political textbook, alongside texts by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara. Mao was by far the most admired figure among the Dhofari people, and many wore Mao badges, not only, according to the author, because he sent them weapons and food, but also because his ideas corresponded to their concerns, because he had a well-developed conception of anticolonial struggle, and because he wrote for peasants.

The Marxism that was taught was nevertheless filtered in one respect: at least during the early years of the revolution, the Front’s leaders and teachers did not mention the Marxist critique of religion, probably to avoid conflict with a population composed of very devout Muslims. On the contrary, although they did not offer any religious instruction, they asserted that there was no contradiction between socialism and Islam. The author agrees with them on this point. In her view, before the revolution, Dhofari society was already based on a sort of tribal communism in which the state was nearly absent. She asserts that the population of the Arabian peninsula was already comfortable with the idea of the rule of the proletariat, since, she says, this idea appears in the Qur’an, and she cites this verse: ‘We wished to favour those who were oppressed in the land, to make them leaders, the ones to survive’ (28:5)². This has been one of the Islamic Left’s favourite verses since the 1970s.

In 1970, the UK replaced the Sultan of Oman with his son, Qaboos. While maintaining his father’s authoritarianism, Qaboos tried not only to defeat the revolution on the battlefield, but also to win over the population, by promoting economic development, building state schools, restoring some of the tribes’ privileges, proclaiming ceaselessly that Islam was the basis of his rule, and claiming that the Popular Front was against Islam. According to Ja‘bub, while this accusation was false for a long time, the Front’s leaders, believing that they had gained the population’s complete confidence, eventually said openly that religion is the opium of the people. In response, their own soldiers rebelled against them, and this led to a schism within the Popular Front. In Ja‘bub’s opinion, if the revolutionaries had continued their selective use of Marxist thought, adapting it to the local society and to its Islamic beliefs, they could have had more success than all the other leftist movements in the Arab world.

After the military defeat of the revolution in 1975, what happened to the social changes that it had brought about? Ja‘bub’s answers to this question are among the most interesting parts of the book. The revolutionaries encouraged and celebrated marriages between members of tribes and formerly enslaved people. The former pupils that Ja‘bub interviewed remember being delighted at these marriages. During the revolution, words associated with racism became repulsive to them, and they even refused to use the word ‘black’ to refer to a person’s skin colour. They proudly told the author that, since they were convinced at the time that tribalism was unjust and reactionary, they spontaneously stopped writing the name of their tribe when they wrote their name. But Ja‘bub observes that, when she met them for the first time, the first question they asked her was ‘What tribe do you belong to?’ and that that their conversation was peppered with remarks about the quality of this or that person’s tribe. Similarly, women educated by the Popular Front are now among the most conservative Dhofari women and the most attached to the outward signs of patriarchal tradition. On one hand, they have become doctors, teachers, and managers, but on the other hand, they have rejected the feminism that the Popular Front advocated and practised.

In Ja‘bub’s view, Marxist theory cannot be applied as is to the tribal social order that existed in Dhofar before the revolution. Nevertheless, there was social injustice, and many of the founders and leaders of the revolution belonged to the non-tribal social categories that suffered from this injustice. This book, which has become an important reference for historical research on the Arabian peninsula, is therefore an important contribution to debates about the relevance of Marxist concepts in different social contexts. It also provides a fascinating glimpse of a population’s ability to sincerely adopt revolutionary values in a quasi-state constructed by militants, only to abandon them with the arrival of the following state.

Bibliography #

Geer, Benjamin. 2025. “Mona Salem Said Ja‘bub, Qiyadat al-mujtama‘ nahw al-taghyir: al-tajriba al-tarbawiyya li-thawrat Dhufar (1969-1992) [Conducir la sociedad hacia el cambio: la experiencia educativa de la revolución de Dhofar].” Prismas. Revista de historia intelectual 29 (1): 412–14. https://doi.org/10.48160/18520499prismas29.1626.

Geer, ‘Mona Ja‘bub, Qiyadat al-mujtama‘ nahw al-taghyir’. ↩︎
M. A. S. Abdel Haleem’s translation. ↩︎

The words ‘Turk’, ‘Arab’, and ‘Greek’ in the Ottoman Empire in 1899

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

While reading Khaled Khalifa’s beautiful, elegiac novel No One Prayed Over Their Graves, I noticed something that may not matter in the context of the novel, but is worth thinking about if you’re interested in the history of social categories that are taken for granted today. The narrator talks about a party thrown by a Christian woman in Istanbul to welcome the new century on the night of 31 December 1899:

He liked Maggie’s idea of welcoming a unique moment with a raucous party that she had begun preparing a month ahead of time. She invited Greek musician friends and a few of her old friends, mostly Christian Turks working in small public roles, or Greeks over sixty who were still lighthearted and loved dancing. They would reminisce about their past with deep grief and plot how to return to their villages in Greece, but year by year they mouldered away in the big city, turning their hands over and remembering that most of their villages had been burned to the ground by Ottoman troops. (p. 142)¹

Elsewhere he talks about a Christian maid from Iraq and a Muslim maid working in the same house in Aleppo near the end of the 19th century:

Before they fell asleep, Margot would remember her youth and tell Um Kheir about the young men who used to wait for her to pass so they could have the boon of a single glance from her…. Hundreds of times Margot retold stories about Muslim youths, Kurds and Arabs and Turks, who had falen in love with her…. (p. 102)

Were the words ‘Turk’, ‘Arab’ and ‘Greek’ used in this way in the Ottoman Empire in 1899? I was sceptical, remembering things like this observation by historian Keith David Watenpaugh about the inhabitants of Aleppo in 1918:

With few exceptions, the question of who was an Arab and who was a Turk rarely arose in the city and would have been considered absurd. Most urbane, literate Aleppines would have bristled at being designated mere ‘Arabs’ or ‘Turks’, terms which in pre-nationalist consciousness connoted backward desert dwellers or rough country people.²

Sociologist Murat Ergin says something similar:

The term “Turk” in the Ottoman Empire was broadly used as a derogatory term referring to unrefined nomads in Anatolia…. [T]he cosmopolitan subjects of the empire living in large cities never considered themselves Turks. This was about to change toward the end of the nineteenth century….³

As for the meaning of the word ‘Greek’ in Anatolia, historian Anthony Bryer writes:

At the beginning of the [19th] century a Pontic Christian might describe himself in the old way as a Douberites, Phytianos or Tsitenos first, and then as a ‘Roman’ (Rum) Orthodox subject of the sultan; by the end of the century he was calling himself a Greek….⁴

So perhaps the meanings of these words were changing, at least for some people, in 1899. In any case, I would like to read a novel that focuses on how social categories changed in that period, and on what was lost with the spread of nationalist concepts.

Bibliography #

Bryer, Anthony. 1991. “The Pontic Greeks Before the Diaspora.” Journal of Refugee Studies 4 (4): 315–34. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/4.4.315.

Ergin, Murat. 2017. “Is the Turk a White Man?”: Race and Modernity in the Making of Turkish Identity. Brill.

Watenpaugh, Keith David. 2005. “Cleansing the Cosmopolitan City: Historicism, Journalism and the Arab Nation in the Post-Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean.” Social History 30 (1): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/030710242000337260.

These quotations and page numbers are from Leri Price’s translation of the novel. For the original Arabic text and page numbers, see the Arabic version of this article. ↩︎
Watenpaugh, ‘Cleansing the Cosmopolitan City’, 9. ↩︎
Ergin, “Is the Turk a White Man?”, 71. ↩︎
Bryer, ‘The Pontic Greeks before the Diaspora’, 327. ↩︎

Shady Lewis, On the Greenwich Line

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The novel On the Greenwich Line, by the Egyptian writer Shady Lewis, came out in 2019. Since reading it in Arabic in 2023, I have given the original Arabic version or the French translation to several of my friends (there’s also a German translation), and now I will be giving other friends the English translation that is due out next month. With great sensitivity, Lewis has written a very funny comic novel about immigration, racism, and bureaucracy in London, where he is a social worker. In a lecture at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris in April 2023, he said that when the news is so full of horrors every day that we become inured to them, humour can revive our feelings. The treatment did me a lot of good.

Sherif Younis, The Sacred March

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

[English version of the text published in Spanish.¹]

Sherif Younis, الزحف المقدس: مظاهرات التنحي وتشكل عبادة ناصر [The Sacred March: The Demonstrations Against Nasser’s Resignation and the Formation of His Cult], 1st edition, Cairo, Dar Mirit, 2005. 2nd revised edition, Beirut and Cairo, Dar al-Tanwir, 2012, 196 pages.

In June 1967, when Gamal Abdel Nasser’s military dictatorship in Egypt suffered a crushing defeat in the Six-Day War against Israel, Nasser immediately announced his resignation. Shortly afterwards, crowds demonstrated for two days across Egypt to beg him to change his mind, and Nasser responded to the outcry by remaining in office. In The Sacred March, the Egyptian historian Sherif Younis asks what led the Egyptian people to call for Nasser to remain in power. How did an authoritarian regime that was ruthless towards the population, and enforced political passivity by means of imprisonment and torture, manage to inspire such fervour? Some historians of Nasserism believe that these demonstrations were a response to the sincere emotions of the demonstrators, while others argue that they were organised by the regime. Taking an original approach to the study of Nasserism, Younis departs from these two interpretations. For him, the demonstrations in support of the leader, which were most likely spontaneous, were also a product of the ideology that the regime had put in place after the military coup of 1952.

A specialist in modern Egyptian history, Younis is one of the most important Egyptian historians of recent decades. To some extent, his work reflects a Foucauldian approach. He has translated classics such as Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973) from English into Arabic, as well as fundamental works on Egyptian history such as Khaled Fahmy’s All the Pasha’s Men (1997) and Timothy Mitchell’s Rule of Experts (2002). His research and translations often fuel intellectual debates in Egypt and the Arab world in general. Given the author’s importance, The Sacred March is undoubtedly one of the most significant contributions in recent decades to debates in Arabic on Nasserism.

The historiography of Nasserism is often apologetic or, in some cases, hagiographic, defending the Nasser regime on the grounds of its anti-colonialism, its Arab nationalism, or its allegedly socialist policies. Sometimes this historiography attempts to analyse Nasserism using popular theories such as Gramscian Marxism or modernisation theory, without managing to explain why the regime took one form rather than another, and why it lasted for almost two decades despite repeated failures. Unlike these approaches, Younis’s study focuses on ideology, and sets out to analyse Nasserism’s fundamental concepts. Through a detailed reading of primary sources (including official speeches, propaganda, and press articles by Nasserist intellectuals), Younis argues against Marxist analyses that associate Nasserism with a social class. On the contrary, in his view, the key to understanding this regime is that it did not represent any particular class or group apart from its own elite. This Nasserist elite consisted of a small clique of officers who, led by Nasser, took power in 1952 and put an end to British rule and the Egyptian monarchy. As Younis explains, the members of this group had diverse political preferences (such as Islamism or communism) and were united by a vague patriotism and an attraction to authoritarianism.

The author observes that with the creation of the Free Officers in September 1949, Nasser and his group renounced all links with political parties and organisations in Egypt, and committed themselves to strict independence from all forces in the political field. In their view, the very existence of political divisions among the Egyptian people was harmful and benefited the colonial powers. The Nasserist elite saw its first task as emptying the public arena of any political organisation that represented only part of the people and thus endangered the nation. By associating division with corruption, the regime presented itself as a means of purifying the people. Younis shows that Nasserism conceived of the people as a collection of atomised individuals, who were expected to line up behind Nasser as in a military parade. This is what the official discourse called the ‘sacred march’: the officers were supposed to embody the conscience and will of an ideal people. According to Younis, in this ‘theological’ conception of politics, two meanings of the term ‘people’ coexisted. On the one hand, there was an ideal and invisible people which, like a god, transmitted its revelation to the officers in a direct and inexplicable way. On the other hand, there was the actually existing people which, weak and corrupt, needed to be guided and transformed into an ideal people. The official ideology presented Nasser as the indispensable intermediary between these two phases of the people, i.e., as a prophet.

For Younis, this conception of Nasser became believable for the population mainly because of the regime’s foreign policy, which was attributed exclusively to the leader, and which aimed to fulfil some of the ambitions of the nationalist movement: to put an end to the humiliation of colonisation and to restore the glory of the homeland. The most important example of this foreign policy was the announcement of the nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956 and the failure of the Israeli, British and French invasion that followed.

Younis shows that Nasser’s authority was based on the idea that only the leader could maintain direct communication with the people. In theory, this communication had a supernatural quality; because of it, the representative institutions abolished by the regime were supposed to be superfluous. Political passivity and the loss of freedoms were seen as the price the Egyptian people had to pay for national dignity. According to Younis, this ideology helped to create a feeling of dependence among the population, which explains the demonstrations against Nasser’s resignation after Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 war. The emotional bond between the demonstrators and Nasser resulted from the regime’s restrictions on the political field (which stemmed from its rejection of a multi-party system), the fulfilment of some of the demands of the nationalist movement, and the effective dissemination of an official theology based on the cult of Nasser. Thus, accustomed to the idea that only Nasser could act and that they were merely spectators and admirers, the demonstrators demanded that ‘the only father they knew’ should remain in office.

Younis continued to develop this analysis in his book نداء الشعب: تاريخ نقدي للإيديولوجيا الناصرية [The Call of the People : A Critical History of Nasserist Ideology] (754 pages), published in 2012, in which he examines in detail the historical roots of this ideology, along with the institutions and policies that contributed to its spread and evolution from the 1952 coup until Nasser’s death in 1970. But The Sacred March already makes an important contribution to our understanding of Egyptian nationalism and the similarities between nationalism and religion. In particular, the use of the category ‘prophet’ to analyse the symbolic domination exercised by a dictator perceived as a ‘national hero’, as well as the idea that nationalism implies a deification of the people (or the nation), encourages us to explore a range of tools from the sociology of religion to analyse the social and ideological structure of nationalism, in the Egyptian context and beyond. This would also be an opportunity to look at another god, the ‘homeland’, to which Younis has paid less attention.

Bibliography #

Geer, Benjamin. 2022. “Sherif Younis, Al-zahf al-muqaddas: muzaharat al-tanahhi wa-tashakkul ‘ibadat Nasir [La Marcha Sagrada: las manifestaciones contra la dimisión de Nasser y la formación de su culto].” Prismas. Revista de historia intelectual 26 (2): 369–70. https://doi.org/10.48160/18520499prismas26.1350.

Geer, ‘Sherif Younis, Al-zahf al-muqaddas’. ↩︎